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2013 CSA – Week 2

Jun 15th, 2013
by sophie.

Kermit, I feel for you but it’s easier being green with the Greens, Glorious Greens cookbook, with over 140 methods of preparing greens (no affiliation).

2013csa_02_01

This week’s share from my 2013 Sport Hill Farm CSA was:

  • 1 head of Tropicana lettuce
  • 1 head of red Romaine lettuce
  • 2 kohlrabi
  • 1 bag of stir-fry mix (komasuna, tatsoi, Bok Choy)
  • 1 bunch of collard greens
  • 1 bunch of curly kale
  • 1 bunch of Lacinato kale (aka Tuscan kale, dinosaur kale, cavolo nero)
  • 1 bag of spinach

This is a lot of  food—where to begin?

I’m particularly excited about the kohlrabi. A few years ago, I didn’t even know what kohlrabi was. I can’t decide whether I want to grill, pan sear, roast, make a slaw, or pickle it. If I don’t decide soon. I’ll just end up eating it raw (also quite delicious). By the way, the leaves are edible too and I expect I’ll probably sauté them with some garlic and olive oil. Here’s a tip from farmer Al: kohlrabi keeps for awhile so if you plan on storing it, remove the leaves so they don’t draw the nutrients away from the head. 

And by the way, Arethusa Farm now makes sour cream and Sport Hill’s farm stand is carrying it as well as raw milk from Baldwin Brook Farm.

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2013 CSA – Week 1

Jun 13th, 2013
by sophie.

As foretold, the first week of my 2013 Sport Hill Farm CSA was greens, greens, greens. Nature thinks it’s high time we ate greens after the winter.

csa2013_01_01

  • 1 head of Oak leaf lettuce
  • 1 head of red Romaine lettuce
  • 1 head of Napa cabbage
  • 1 bunch of heirloom Spigarello
  • 1 bunch of dandelion greens
  • 1 bunch of bok choy

Spigarello is a green in the kale and broccoli family from the Puglia region of southern Italy. I sautéed mine with garlic and olive oil (surprised?). It has the texture of kale but a more mild taste like broccoli.

Dandelion greens are super healthy and super bitter, so you need to blanch them in boiling water for a couple of minutes before using them in a recipe. Then they are just fine!

My farmer is so cool that she gives us recipes for CSA items!

For the dandelion greens, she shared this this dandelion tart recipe from the NY Times. I made it without the pie shell (the gratin version), used Arethusa Farm Dairy heavy cream instead of milk, Sankow’s Beaver Brook‘s Pleasant Son cheese and Sport Hill Farm eggs. This is crazy delicious.

dandelion_tart

For the Napa cabbage, Patti gave us her Nana’s Slaw Recipe:

  • 1/2 cup Mayo
  • 1/4 cup cider vinegar
  • 1/4 olive oil
  • 1/8 cup sugar
  • salt & pepper to taste

Place ingredients in a mason jar. Cover, shake and pour over chopped green cabbage or Napa cabbage.

The dressing is excellent and I don’t see why it can’t be used with other greens that are not cabbages. It made a nice companion for the tart (which I did as a gratin).

csa2013_01_02

 

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CSA 2013 Opening Day!

Jun 4th, 2013
by sophie.

This is the week my Sport Hill Farm 2013 CSA begins!

CSA is Community Supported Agriculture. While there are many programs out there, the basic idea is that the subscriber pays the seed money in the winter so the farmer has the capital to get things growing, then receives weekly shares of food based on the harvest.

If this is your first CSA, here are some tips and strategies for getting the most out of the program:

Get Debbie Meyer Green Bags. I have no affiliation with this company, financial or otherwise, just experienced affection. Vegetables can last 2 weeks in these bags. They’re on the expensive side, but your veggies are worth it.

Get a salad spinner. In the first few weeks, there will be lettuce. Lots of it. Varieties you didn’t know existed. A salad spinner makes light work of cleaning the greens. Did you know, Julia Child first introduced us to salad spinners?

Get a few good salad dressing recipes you like. Seriously, there will be a lot of lettuce in the beginning because that’s what grows at this time of year in New England. I really don’t like salad and have attempted cooking just about every lettuce. Some do better than others! Lately, I’ve been trying to get more apple cider vinegar in my diet due to the health benefits and so I’ve made my own apple cider vinegar dressing.

  • 1/4 c apple cider vinegar
  • 1/4 c olive oil
  • 2 Tbsp maple syrup
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 2 pinches of sea salt
  • 4 pinches of garlic powder

Combine in a container with a sealing lid (like Rubbermaid) and shake, shake, shake.

You might get more food than you can finish. Most CSAs are designed to provide veggies for the week for a family of four. If your eating group is smaller, you can put by food for the winter and eat locally year round. It doesn’t have to be an all-day project either. While cooking your regular dinner, cook an extra item to put away. Blanch some broccoli on the back burner to freeze.

Tip: Many local farms are producing cool weather greens all winter long. Thanks to Sport Hill Farm, Fort Hill Farm, Riverbank Farm, and Holbrook Farm, I had fresh greens all winter. Put by the items that will not be available in the winter like broccoli, green beans, summer squashes, corn, and so on. Choose items that will complement the other foods that you can get in the winter. For example, meat and dairy are available year round, so you might want to make sure you have plenty of tomatoes, garlic, onions, and herbs for any soup, stew, or roast you’ll want to make.

Since I mentioned freezing, I need to mention my vacuum sealer. I couldn’t live without it! Because they remove the air from the bag, food lasts longer. While most brands advertise that foods last 3-6 months, I can honestly tell you that I’ve had some things last 2-3 years!

You’re not going to like everything you get. Swap or figure out something to do with it that you will like and remember, it gets better. For example. I don’t LOVE corn. Before you gasp, I do LIKE it. I generally need about one ear a summer and I’m over it. However, it turns out I LOVE corn in the dead of winter—it’s like opening packaged summer. So I cut of the kernels off the cob, vacuum seal and freeze them, and enjoy them in January and February (with lots of butter). Same with those salad turnips—boring (to me) when they’re in season, but pickled with mustard seeds and other spices and given six months to chill in the fridge, they’re awesome!

You’re not going to recognize some of the items or you won’t know what to do with them. Welcome to the CSA where the adventure is half the fun of it. Google is your friend! Search out a few recipes, pick one (or select the best featured from a few), and dive in. If they’re greens, you might try my go-to method of cooking greens to get a sense of the green’s properties and flavors to determine what else you might do with it next time.

Most importantly, have fun with this. If it sometimes feels like you’re on an episode of Chopped, remember that you don’t need to make it work with jelly beans and a package of dried shrimp.

Posted in: CSA, farms, locavore, organic.
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Crown Lamb Roast

May 27th, 2013
by sophie.

While everyone else is posting pictures of fabulous Memorial Day barbecues and parades, I give you Easter!

My family celebrated Easter late this year (no, not this late!) so that we could all be together at the table. They usually let me have one course of local fare if I’m not hosting (and I only host Thanksgiving).

Since it was such a hit last year, I made a crown lamb roast again, this time from Saugatuck Craft Butchery. This American Dorsett lamb was raised and processed by Meiller Farms in Pine Plains, NY.

Paul did a fabulous job Frenching the racks and preparing the crown.

Paul SCB

I rubbed it down with some olive oil and pressed in an herb mix of rosemary (from a potted Gilbertie’s I kept alive from last year on my windowsill), garlic (from Sport Hill Farm, dehydrated into slices and ground into powder), thyme (also (from Sport Hill Farm), and salt. I wrapped the bones in foil to protect them from burning.

Cooking method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roast bones down on a roasting pan for half the time (allow 8-10 minutes per pound), then turn it over to”right side up” for the second half until the internal temp is 130 degrees. Let it sit, covered with foil for 15-20 minutes. Voila:

lets_eat

Seriously delicious and tender.

[Apologies that the pictures were taken with a phone and not a camera.]

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Local St. Paddy’s

Mar 17th, 2013
by sophie.

While I know that real Irish people (in Ireland) don’t eat corned beef, I have these culinary adventures on my list and today seemed like the right day to make my As-Local-As-It-Could-Be Reuben Sandwich.

rueben

The corned beef began as a brisket from Eagle Wood Farms. I followed Alton Brown’s recipe for corning, except instead of his spice list from faraway places, I got a pre-made mix of faraway spices from Penzey’s in Norwalk. I added salt and potassium nitrate (yes), not local. I brined it for 10 days, turning it every morning and evening. I cooked it with:

corned_beef

The sauerkraut began as cabbage from Sport Hill Farm, fermented per Sandor Katz‘s instructions. This would have been a great entry in the Westport Market’s cabbage contest, but there wasn’t enough time for the fermentation. It’s been fermenting for several weeks now. This is not my first attempt, but it is my first attempt that worked!

fermenting_sauerkraut

I made the rye bread following Martha Stewart’s recipe (mostly).

  • bread flour – red hard spring wheat from Wild Hive
  • rye flour from Wild Hive
  • honey from Swords and Plowshares
  • butter from Smyth’s Trinity Farm
  • yeast and salt: not local. I didn’t use caraway seeds.

Color me delightfully surprised when the loaf really did “tip out” of the loaf pan!

rye_bread

The Swiss cheese is Cry Baby from Arethusa Farm Dairy. (Thank you, Lisa from New Morning! I owe you big time.)

The dressing. Sigh. Should it be Thousand Island or Russian? What constitutes an authentic recipe of either? Here’s what I made:

dressing

Served with a dill pickle, fermented right here. Original cucumbers from Daffodil Hill Growers.

And that’s my sandwich. I hope you had a happy St. Paddy’s Day!

 

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Peas be with you

Mar 17th, 2013
by sophie.

The cooperative event between Debra Tyler’s Motherhouse and Bluestone Farm Living Arts Center was billed as such:

Women’s Wisdom: Sacred Agriculture

Mar 16,2013  -  Time:  9:00 am – 4:00 pm

Motherhouse and Bluestone Farm invite all women to join in a full day celebration of our connection to the earth through sacred agriculture. We’ll share our farming herstories, rituals, pea planting, pot-luck lunch, earth blessing way of the council, drumming circle and more.

In case you’ve never thought of sacred and agriculture together, here’s a good short read on the spirituality of farming. In case you don’t readily picture women when you think of farming, consider that the first farmers some 8-10,000 years ago were likely women and that the fastest growing group of those entering farming today are women.

My apologies for the pictures below. I used a phone (which is not a camera, despite what they say) and I was so caught up in the event, I forgot all about an illustrative progression. There are much better shots over at the Bluestone Farm Fans Facebook page and at Motherhouse’s blog.

We began with a fire and some food, mostly homemade from scratch. When I say from scratch, I mean the cheese spread was made from cream from their own cows. From scratch.

We blessed and sorted the dry peas, which are both food and seeds. These peas are not your garden variety peas, but a pea that’s more like a bean (whose name I should have written down but didn’t). Although much smaller, they have culinary attributes similar to a garbanzo, yet thrive in our climes. We were sorting through them to find the best specimens to plant—those that would produce the best plants. We prepared the beds, put up fences for the plants to climb, and planted the pea seeds in the still-frozen Earth.

planting_2 planting_1

We visited with the cows.

cows_1 cows_2

We ate a fabulous pot luck lunch.

eating

We smudged with sage, we drummed, we spoke.

drumming_2 drumming_1

While I left exhausted, it was a most excellent day. This was the inaugural event of the space that had previously been a school, which is now something new. It was a pleasure to be part of the energy transfer.

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The Good Stuff is Worth It

Mar 9th, 2013
by sophie.

At one of the sessions at the CT NOFA Winter Conference 2013, the topic of the high price of good food came up. It turns out that when people know what they are getting and why, they accept the premium on high-value foods. High-values foods are those that were raised and processed in a clean and sustainable manner, where nutrition and taste are the priorities.

CAFO

Unhappy Cows

For over 50 years, Americans have been the lab rats in the great processed food and high-volume farming experiment. If you look at our health record in that same time, you’d have to conclude the experiment was a failure. We now have an unnatural relationship with food, know next to nothing about where it comes from, or even what qualifies as food. As it happens, animals raised in close confinement are bad for you and fat obtained from these animals is bad for you too. Animals slaughtered in facilities that process thousands of animals a day have a statistical probablility of introducing a food-borne pathogens into the line so they take remediation measures (such as washing the meat in ammonia) that may not be good for us either. When you factor in the health and environmental costs of cheap food, it’s significantly more expensive than the expensive food!

For over 50 years, we let corporate shills dressed as scientists tell us:

  • Fat is bad. Animal fats are especially bad and vegetable fats (like Canola oil) are better.
  • Cholesterol is bad.
  • Skim milk is good.
  • Light anything is good; Full-fat anything is bad.
  • Lard is bad. Crisco and margarine are good.
Pastured

Happy Cows

People are starting to challenge these assumptions. Many are returning to the methods that sustained humankind for over 10,000 years. These methods contradict the current food and nutritional “wisdom.”

Little by little, we are finding our way back to the foods and food plans that nurtured us. People are putting by (canning, freezing, dehydrating) their own provisions from known sources. People are returning to bone broths and rendered animal fats. People are returning to foods they can make in their own homes. People are buying chickens from farmers whose practices they know so that they don’t have to do an anti-nuke anti-backterial lockdown afterwards. The home town butcher is returning! (Check out Saugatuck Craft Butchery in Westport, CT and Butchers Best Market in Newtown, CT.)

There’s so much to know and it can be daunting trying to figure out where to get started. Here are a few links to the front runners of traditional foods. These people and organizations advocate making bone broths, and rendering their own animal fats for use in cooking, and using the whole animal.

  • The Weston A. Price Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt nutrition education foundation. Of special note is this article, The Oiling of America.
  • Sally Fallon is the President of Weston Price Foundation. Her cookbook on traditional, nutrient-dense foods is worth a read, even if you don’t cook! She also made a video discussing the oiling of America.
  • Cheeseslave is an advocate of healthy traditional foods, full fat dairy, and against the anti-cholesterol hype. Her site has recipes, tips, and news for people who want to eat real food.

I believe it’s the modern pseudo-foods like margarine and soy milk and convenience foods full of additives, pesticides, and MSG that are making us sick. Full-fat dairy and other traditional foods have been sustaining humans for millennia. And that’s good enough for me.

  • Food Renegade is an advocate of healthy traditional foods. Her site has recipes, tips, and news for people who want to eat real food as well.

I am a rebel. I like to eat red meat. I think butter is good for me. I drink my milk raw. I avoid pre-packaged foods like the plague. I don’t believe the health claims on food labels. And, I like my food to be fresh, wholesome, and traditional.

This list is by no means exhaustive—it’s meant to be a starting point. Feel free to share other sources in the comment section.

Happy reading and happy eating!

Posted in: locavore, NOFA, nutrition, putting by, resources.
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TEDx Manhattan

Feb 18th, 2013
by sophie.

If you missed the TEDx Manhattan event on Changing the Way We Eat, you can catch the videos from the three sessions here.

  • Session 1: Inform
  • Session 2: Educate
  • Session 3: Empower

As you might imagine, some speakers were better than others. Here are some of my notes and observations, by no means exhaustive.

  • One of our issues is that governmental health departments do not have the kinds of resources that fast food companies do. Unfortunately, when we “shrink government,” our protection gets shrunk, not waste and fraud.
  • With respect to advertising and metrics, Anna Lappe told junk food corporations: “My kids, all our kids, are none of your business.”
  • Agreed with and loved Annemarie Colbin (of Natural Gourmet) until she said “Good food should be fresh and natural–not canned or frozen” (because they don’t have the right chi). No putting by?! Annemarie, this is how we have local fruits and veggies in the Northeast throughout the dark days of winter, chi notwithstanding.
  • We should insist that industrial producers pay for their damage!
  • People (eaters) need to be willing to pay what food is worth–really worth–without subsidies.
  • Shout out to our own Michel Nischan of the Dressing Room and Wholesome Wave.
  • Check out Founding Gardeners

a fascinating look at the revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen and farmers.

For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating.

  • Steve Wing, in his talk about factory farming, said we “We have to change policies to help local residents near factory farms. Not just eat local.” He probably didn’t mean to say “just” in that tone. Eating locally DOES matter and an achievable first step for many. In fact, if everyone did it, factory farming would be out of business! I believe (and hope) that his point was that we can do more. P.S. Locavores DO eat global food–just not the items that grow well in our local or regional food shed.
  • Farm to Freezer is an incredibly fabulous idea
  • With respect to food banks, Jeff Bridges astutely noted that, “Charity’s a great thing, but it’s not the way to end hunger.” As he pointed out, we aren’t funding the military through charity.
  • David McInerney of Fresh Direct brought out his farmers!

Overall, it was a positive event and we have much work to do.

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Specious species claim

Jan 20th, 2013
by sophie.

I read a lot of blogs and books on real food, farming, nutrition, and so on. (Disclaimer: I am not a nutritionist or a farmer, just a food blogger and an eater of real food.) There is one recurring truthy, specious factoid out there that just won’t quit. (Vocabulary below.) That one persistent truthy, specious factoid is “humans are the only animal to drink milk from other species.”

Here’s the real fact: humans are the only animal that figured out how to obtain and store the milk of another species so that we could consume it on demand. Lots of other mammals would love to drink the milk of another species but have to rely either on extra-species largesse or on humans to get it. The proof is in the pictures.

Cats emulating bipeds:

happy cat

Some serious interspecies sharing:

sharing...

Even this (ewww):

Now here’s something you don’t see every day (unless you have a cat):

Scottie pinwheel dance for goats milk:

 

As it happens, humans are the only species that pay to live on the Earth.

 

Vocabulary

specious (Google)

  1. Superficially plausible, but actually wrong: “a specious argument”.
  2. Misleading in appearance, esp. misleadingly attractive: “a specious appearance of novelty”. In other words, sounds true but it isn’t

truthiness

Coined by Stephen Colbert: the quality of knowing something in your gut, or your heart, as opposed to in your head.

From Merriam-Webster:

  1. “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” October 2005)
  2. “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

factoid (Wikipedia)

A factoid is a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated) statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”.

 

Posted in: health, nutrition, raw milk.
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Cabbage Forage

Jan 19th, 2013
by sophie.

In honor of the Westport Farmers Market‘s Cabbage Recipe contest, I adapted this Crock Pot Cabbage and Pork Soup recipe with a cabbage head from Sport Hill Farm.

cabbage_pork_soup

I changed it up to keep it local and also used a Dutch oven instead of a crock pot.

Food Sources:

I cooked it in the oven in a covered Dutch oven for one hour at 325ºF and six more hours at 200ºF.

The sweet and heat give it a unique flavor depth, but you can still taste the individual ingredients. Even if I don’t win the contest, I still win because this is a healthy soup made from excellent ingredients from exceptional farms.

 

Posted in: Connecticut, farmer's markets, farms, locavore.
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